A Democratic Supreme Court justice in the U.S. state of West Virginia said hours after she was impeached Tuesday that she was retiring, triggering a special election for her replacement and denying the Republican governor a chance to name her successor.

The citizens of West Virginia now “will be afforded their constitutional right to elect my successor in November,” Justice Robin Davis said as she announced her departure at the state capital.

Davis announced her resignation after being impeached for committing wrongful acts, including spending $500,000 on office renovations.

The House of Delegates voted Monday to impeach all four remaining justices over spending issues. They will be brought to trial in the Senate, which is controlled by Republicans, as is the House.

Davis said their impeachment was a travesty of justice and a brazen attempt by one branch of government to seize control over another.

Justice Menis Ketchum retired earlier this year. Any of the three remaining justices who are considering resigning must do so by the Tuesday deadline in order for their replacements to be decided in a November special election. Gov. Jim Justice will appoint replacements who will serve until the election.

All four justices were impeached for failing to control expenses and for not maintaining policies over matters involving state vehicles, working lunches and the use of office computers at home.

Hungary’s government will stop financing gender studies university courses, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s chief of staff said on Tuesday, marking one of the first concrete steps in a cultural shift signaled last month.

Re-elected in April to a third consecutive term, right-wing nationalist Orban said in July that major cultural and intellectual changes were in the works, adding that his landslide victory was “nothing short of a mandate to build a new era.”

Chief of staff Gergely Gulyas cited low enrollment numbers, which he said would be reason enough alone to shut down the courses, but also spelled out the government’s ideological opposition at a news conference.

“The Hungarian government is of the clear view that people are born either men or women. They lead their lives the way they think best, but beyond this, the Hungarian state does not wish to spend public funds on education in this area,” he said.

Orban’s supporters want a shift towards conservative values to end what they call a dominance of leftists and liberals in the arts, science and education.

The move against the gender studies courses is one of the first specific such government policies. Others included a move to reduce the independence of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in the allocation of public research funding.

Gender studies courses are taught at the state-run university ELTE and Central European University, which are among the top universities in Hungary.

Gulyas said those already enrolled could finish their studies but Budapest would stop financing the courses from the next academic year.

The proposal first surfaced in Hungarian media last week, triggering opposition from the social sciences faculty of ELTE. “We consider it worrying that the proposal aims to shut down a course dealing with social relations between men and women, gender inequalities as well as issues of family anddemographics,” Dean Gabor Juhasz said in a statement.

ELTE did not immediately comment on the decision on Tuesday. It could not immediately give a total number of enrollees.

Last year it planned to enroll 18 students in its master’s program but only 10 applied, state news agency MTI said.

CEU also declined immediate comment on Tuesday. It issued a statement after the proposal was first aired, saying the school “reaffirms its commitment to academic freedom and rejects any attempt at censoring academic curricula.”

CEU said it has 44 students enrolled in a two-year master’s program that offers two degrees, one Hungarian and one American. The Hungarian degrees are now at risk for future enrollees. CEU’s other gender studies students and PhD candidates only get U.S. degrees, which are unaffected.

CEU is founded by Hungarian-born U.S. financier George Soros. The government has made the demonization of Soros, who promotes liberal causes though his charities, a central plank of its ideology.

“Gender-faithful liberals have already caused irreparable harm in the souls of generations growing up in the past decades. We need to fight them without compromise and achieve a complete victory, otherwise they will end up destroying us,” sociologist Balint Botond wrote.

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Akshay Kumar is the Khiladi of Bollywood as we all know. He does meaningful cinema and doesn’t pick crappy movies.

Akshay Kumar, the actor who is famous for doing films based on social issues, patriotic and biopics is coming once again with the film titled as Gold. The film is based on India’s first gold medal win as a free nation in 1948. Well, apart from films on social issues, he has a lot of social work to his credit.

So recently, the actor took to his Instagram handle and posted videos. In the videos, he gives a social message that tells us how we neglect traffic and safety rules which armeantts for the good of the common public.

However, people try to neglect it and do what we wish to do which is a wrong move.

But, is Akshay is stereotyped doing only films based on which causes? There is a lot of talks over his choice of projects. And, when he asked about it, he said, “I hate getting tagged. I don’t like people telling me that ‘He does good action or he keeps doing patriotic stuff’. I feel suffocated when they try to put me in a corner, I feel like running away from it. I hate it. That’s why I’m doing films like Housefull 4, Hera Pheri 3, Kesari, Good News and a horror-comedy.”

Like some film, again his upcoming film will release on Independent Day. He also cleared all the speculations about the choice of his films and said, “I don’t do patriotic films to prove a point, I do it because the stories are so beautiful… I watched ‘Gold’ for the second time last night and I was blown away. We knew that we were making a sports drama but we didn’t think it would turn out to be such a commercial film.”

Akshay is not believed to do only one or two films in the year, as per he said it took only a month or two to complete a film. So, he does multiple films,”I never find it difficult to switch characters. Once the costume is off, and the film is over, I move to the next. I am not one of those who locks themselves in a room for a month to prepare for a role. I can’t do that. People who talk about the in-depth process of getting into the skin of the character, I think, are lying. If the look is right, 70 per cent of the job is done.”

Well, we hope you learn something from this and follow the message given by the actor himself.

Published by Minal Gupta on 14 Aug 2018

Humans already find it unnerving enough when extremely alien-looking robots are kicked and interfered with, so one can only imagine how much worse it will be when they make unbroken eye contact and mirror your expressions while you heap abuse on them. This is the future we have selected.

The Simulative Emotional Expression Robot, or SEER, was on display at SIGGRAPH here in Vancouver, and it’s definitely an experience. The robot, a creation of Takayuki Todo, is a small humanoid head and neck that responds to the nearest person by making eye contact and imitating their expression.

It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s pretty complex to execute well, which, despite a few glitches, SEER managed to do.

At present it alternates between two modes: imitative and eye contact. Both, of course, rely on a nearby (or, one can imagine, built-in) camera that recognizes and tracks the features of your face in real time.

In imitative mode the positions of the viewer’s eyebrows and eyelids, and the position of their head, are mirrored by SEER. It’s not perfect — it occasionally freaks out or vibrates because of noisy face data — but when it worked it managed rather a good version of what I was giving it. Real humans are more expressive, naturally, but this little face with its creepily realistic eyes plunged deeply into the uncanny valley and nearly climbed the far side.

Eye contact mode has the robot moving on its own while, as you might guess, making uninterrupted eye contact with whoever is nearest. It’s a bit creepy, but not in the way that some robots are — when you’re looked at by inadequately modeled faces, it just feels like bad VFX. In this case it was more the surprising amount of empathy you suddenly feel for this little machine.

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That’s largely due to the delicate, childlike, neutral sculpting of the face and highly realistic eyes. If an Amazon Echo had those eyes, you’d never forget it was listening to everything you say. You might even tell it your problems.

This is just an art project for now, but the tech behind it is definitely the kind of thing you can expect to be integrated with virtual assistants and the like in the near future. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad one I guess we’ll find out together.

The complaint explains that Tinder was supposed to be valued in 2017, 2018, 2020 and 2021; On those days, employees should have been able to exercise their stock options. Instead, the lawsuit alleges that parent company IAC/Match Group inaccurately lowballed Tinder’s valuation in July 2017 at $3 billion, the same as it did two years ago despite the dating app’s substantial growth. Then, the parent company secretly merged Tinder into Match Group, which meant employees earned far less in stock options. Then, IAC threatened to terminate anyone who revealed how much the company was actually worth, the lawsuit claims.

Tinder co-founders Sean Rad, Justin Mateen and Jonathan Badeen, three current executives and four other former execs are named on the lawsuit. It further alleges that interim Tinder CEO Greg Blatt, who had replaced Rad, sexually harassed the company’s vice president of marketing and communications, Rosette Pambakian, during a company holiday party in 2016. The suit claims the incident was covered up because Blatt was spearheading the aforementioned scheme to produce an artificially low valuation of Tinder.

The suit cites last week’s SEC-mandated IAC/Match Group earnings call, which noted Tinder is on track to hit $800 million in revenue thanks to premium services like Tinder Plus and the subscription-based Tinder Gold, which give users bonus features and privileges. That prediction is 75 percent higher than what IAC/Match projected when it absorbed Tinder last year, the complaint alleged.

We’ve reached out to Tinder and its parent company for comment and will update when we hear back. IAC and Match Group provided a joint statement to The Wall Street Journal that read:

“Since Tinder’s inception, Match Group has paid out in excess of a billion dollars in equity compensation to Tinder’s founders and employees. With respect to the matters alleged in the complaint, the facts are simple: Match Group and the plaintiffs went through a rigorous, contractually defined valuation process involving two independent global investment banks, and Mr. Rad and his merry band of plaintiffs did not like the outcome.”

Tariffs imposed on goods imported from China, Europe and other parts of the world could hurt American consumers and small businesses more than help them. Analysts point out that in today’s global economy, most manufacturers produce parts and import others to make a final product. Tariffs imposed on Chinese electronic parts have already forced a U.S. TV factory to close down, and there are concerns that U.S. farmers could lose big markets overseas. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke has more.

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The scandal is continuing between President Donald Trump and former aide and reality-show star Omarosa Manigault Newman who is going public with recordings of conversations she had with the president and his chief of staff. Manigault Newman says she secretly recorded the audio, raising questions about possible security breaches at the White House. VOA White House correspondent Patsy Widakuswara has the latest.